A Memory Called Empire (Arkady Martine)

5/5. This is an amazing book and I'm still reeling from it, a week later. How do I describe this book? An ambassador is sent to the Teixcalaanli Empire, which is in a lot of ways Space Byzantium. (Arkady Martine is, I guess, the pen name of a historian, and you can tell because it's dense and detailed and complete in a way that many books aren't.) With poetry! And the poetry is political! And the book wants to talk about empire, and belonging, and identity, and culture, and civilization, and colonization, and being seduced by empire, and what does friendship even mean in those contexts. I MEAN. It's like Martine reached into my brain and was like "okay, shall I write you a book that caters to all of your interests?" YES PLEASE. SPACE BYZANTIUM. WITH POETRY. I MEAN. (Sadly, all the poetry in the book is in English translation from Teixcalaanli; there is of course a missing wealth of structure and textual complexity that we would understand if only we understood Teixcalaanli... um... which... did I mention this book is really interested in examining the seduction of empire? The Empire is pretty awful, but even so I was seduced pretty early on, okay.)

(There is a spot where a poet recites a poem, and then the protagonist and her attache spend three pages dissecting its political meaning. I was so delighted. If this makes you want to read it, THIS IS THE BOOK FOR YOU. If not, then... maybe not?)

And you know how in Dune everyone's saying stuff and there's double meanings underneath? And several different plots going on at the same time? Yeah. This book too. (No sandworms, though.) I LOVE THIS. All the people in this book have their own agenda, which means there are multiple layers of plots, most of which get resolved brilliantly by the end (but not all; there's one seriously unresolved big hook for a sequel to come, and I can't wait to see what happens). Only it's much more readable and immersive than Dune.

And it's got lovely characters! There's a lot of competence porn in this, let me just say, which is my jam also. But also all the characters are interesting -- mostly trying to do the best they can, sometimes ruthless, often making difficult choices that may or may not align with what the reader might think of as ethical, or moral, or nice. It hits just the right spot for me in between Goblin Emperor and The Monster Baru Cormorant -- enough plotting and double-crossing that it didn't get too cloying, but not so much that it was hit-you-over-the-head depressing.

I've already mentioned the worldbuilding -- the world is very different! Mahit, the main character, is from a different culture/environment than the Empire, and both cultures are very interesting both in relation to each other and in contrast, and in the sorts of reactions Mahit has. The interesting thing is, it's different enough that I would recommend reading this book in large chunks rather than the way I read books, which is often in short spurts of several pages at a time (before I have to go deal with some usually-child-created crisis), and I was noticing that it would always take me about a page or so to re-immerse myself in the universe of the book, and before that happened it would code as much more alien to me!

And romance/sex is not something that gets a lot of screen time in this book (this is a huge plus for me, lol), but of the sexual/romantic relationships in this book, there is one M/F, one M/M (both very much background, same M character), and one F/F (UST, which gets the most screen time).

It's well written. One thing that I've been annoyed about recently, doing my Hugo reading (probably I will rant about this sooner rather than later), is the eat-your-vegetables and/or wish-fulfillment approach to SF/F, where a Problem of Contemporary Society is handled in an SF/F book or story by one of the characters Pointing Out, Pointedly, the problem in the story and then the problem being fixed, all in a sort of "Look how terrible the people who Have This Problem are!" sort of way. This book manages to examine fairly profound problems of colonization and empire in an organic way that arises out of the story, without falling into those kinds of traps, and observes that you can be a fundamentally decent person and still... have This Problem, because you've never thought about it any other way.

Oh! And there's a subplot (extremely minor, but still) that has to do with machine learning / AI and actually treats it in a more-or-less intelligent way, which is something I don't see very often :D

It's also well paced and structured, and does that SF thing where it teaches you about the world until there's this climax that utterly depends on you understanding a very different culture/society/way of looking at things and because it has taught it to you patiently over the course of the book.

( Spoilers! Book-destroying spoilers and also you won't understand them without reading the book. )

This book also was reminiscent for me of Yoon Ha Lee's Ninefox Gambit, in that the main character has another character that's supposed to be inside her head, and Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning, in the sort of dense nature of the worldbuilding. But I liked Empire much much more than either of those (neither of which I actually finished). I will say that I suspect Ann Leckie's Ancillary books are probably more groundbreaking and juggle more balls in the air at the same time? I'm not sure, though, because this book just hit all the things I want and love so precisely, more so than the Ancillary books, that I can't really be impartial about it, and I love it to little bits and pieces.

My biggest problem -- and it wasn't really a problem, just an observation -- is that Martine uses a lot of italics, to the point where I was channeling Mr. Carpenter from the Emily books: "Beware -- of -- italics!"

But really I don't have a lot coherent to say about this (hence all these short bursts of enthusiasm) except if you happen to share tropes with me YOU WILL PROBABLY LOVE THIS BOOK.